Her mother let go of her arm and walked directly across the lawn and pulled a leaf off the bay and crushed it between her fingers and smelled it.
“Good leaf. They water it. Not many gardens in town keep a bay properly watered.”
“Mrs Greer has gardeners.”
“Mrs Greer has more than gardeners, by the smell of this. Someone here cares about plants. Is it you?”
“Not yet, Mama. I have been here only eleven days.”
“Then someone before you. Or one of the gardeners. We shall see.”
Lady Thornwick began her circuit. She ran her fingers along the box hedge, crouched to feel the soil between her fingers, pulled a spent head off a lavender bush and rubbed it between her palms. Violet had watched her mother move through gardens this way since she was old enough to follow. The commentary was half-whispered, directed at the plants rather than at anyone listening. The light, which had been grey at breakfast, was beginning to come through the high clouds.
“Are you happy, my love?”
“I am.”
“Let me see you.”
Violet looked at her.
“I am happy, Mama. His Grace is good to me. He is busy with his affairs, and I am busy with the house. We hardly cross paths in a day, but he is not unkind. He has settled my pin-money and ordered everything for me I asked for and a great deal that I did not. The household is generous. The staff are respectful.”She paused. “He is an important man. He is preoccupied with his concerns. It is the natural way of things in a house like this.”
A deep crease formed between her mother’s brows.
“That is exactly what I told myself, my dear, for the first ten years of my marriage. Your father was an important man, in his way. He went to Parliament three days in the week and read the papers at his club two days more, and what remained of him on Sundays was a man with a good opinion of his own occupations and very little time for the woman he had married.”
Her mother crouched down to examine a flowerbed. “I had told myself that he was not a bad husband but an absent one. He thought of us, spoke of us, arranged for us when arrangement was required.”
She stood up, rubbing the dirt off her hands. “But even that ended when Primrose was born.”
“Primrose?”
“Yes. I do not know to this day what figures came home with him from his man of business that week. He went into his study and was different when he came out. He never sat in Parliament again. After that came the rest of it. The cards, and the brandy, and the schemes, and the men he should not have had in the house, and the daughters he had stopped thinking about.”
Violet brushed dirt off her mother’s skirt.
“I am not telling you this to frighten you, Violet. I am telling you that a husband who is busy with his affairs can be a good husband even if he is an absent one. However, I should not wish you to mistake the absence of cruelty for the presence of love. That is all.”
“He has not been cruel to me, Mama. I shall not expect much more than that.”
Her mother cradled Violet’s face gently with one hand. “I hear such wicked rumours about the man’s character, his violenttemper. The moment he becomes cruel, you come home, you hear?”
“Yes, Mama.”
They began walking again, arm in arm, taking one deliberate step at a time.
“Have you bought any new clothes for yourself and the girls?” Violet asked as she linked arms with her mother. “Or furniture for the house?”
“Not yet. I would not know what to do. I was hoping that perhaps you might help since you would know where to go.”
Violet felt a knot form in her belly as the unwelcome memory of the modiste came back to her. “I shall do my best. I could enlist Mrs Greer’s assistance. She is more proficient than anyone I have seen.”
“That would be wonderful. Primrose must have her debut this Season.”
They made their way back toward the house. Her mother’s voice was a little lighter when she spoke next. “Mrs Bickle mentioned a place called Renshaw’s on Lamb’s Conduit Street. Do you know of it?”
“No.”